Tuesday, 28 May 2013

Being Not-Japanese in a Japanese School

“She’s Chinese” the home room teacher said, pointing to a
seven year old girl, a look of frustration (disgust?) on her face. “She doesn’t
understand a word of Japanese.” “That’s ok” I said. “I’m teaching English.” At
the start of the class I gestured some feelings (yawning for sleepy, smiling
for happy) then asked the children their feelings. When I asked the girl, the
teacher leaped in between us. “She’s Chinese, from CHINA” she said. “Yes,” I
said, “I know. She can gesture just as well as everyone else.” The girl looked
at me uncertainly and smiled. “Hap-py?” I gave her a thumbs up, and the teacher
backed off. I taught them some animals (happily no cocks in this class), then
distributed some bingo sheets. I said the first animal, and the girl looked at
her sheet uncertainly, then looked at the kids beside her to see what they were
doing. The teacher bustled over. “This is bingo” she said loudly, wringing her
hands together violently. “BINGO. BI N GO. BINGO.”
She turned to me, threw her hands in the air as if to say “this is
impossible” and stomped back over to the corner of the room. And sat down next
to the girl and repeated the name of the animal. She pointed to the correct
square. I circled it. Then I pointed to three squares in a row vertically and
gave her a thumbs up, then horizontally, then diagonally. “OK?” I asked. She
squirmed excitedly, catching on quickly, and nodded vigorously. Not being the
most gracious person, I shot a look at the teacher with my eyebrows up. It’s not that hard to communicate. It really
isn’t.

If you live… I was going to say a multicultural country, but
really, pretty much anywhere in the world except Japan, you will at some point
have spoken with someone who was not fluent in your own language. For many
Japanese people, nothing fills them with more dread than the thought of trying
to communicate with a non-Japanese person. The stated aims of English lessons
(literally “foreign language activities”) in elementary school are to encourage
students to think openly about communication, using both verbal and non-verbal
ways to communicate. The lessons are based on communicating things that matter
(do you like soccer? Can you swim? How do I get to the library?) rather than
the “this is a pen” type fare we teach in JHS. The communication aspect of the
curriculum is, predictably, the section most often ignored by the Japanese
teachers, who instead agonise over the correct intonation for “tomato”. As
little kids, communication comes naturally. When the six year olds talk to me,
if I can’t understand what they say they will gesture, point, draw a picture or
think of a synonym. By the time they are in JHS, if they say something I don’t
understand they say “it’s impossible” and give up. There’s nothing innate about
this behaviour, it is learned. Or rather, the openness of the young children is
knocked out of them as they get older. I appreciate the stated aims of the
elementary lessons, but I wish we could put all the teachers through a crash
course in communication too.

Of course, it isn’t just communication. At another school,
three young children from Spain with no Japanese ability began attending classes.
The teachers used google translate to communicate with them fairly effectively,
but they treated the children in a way that made me extremely uncomfortable.
One little boy, aged seven, was having a particularly hard time settling in.
The girl who sat next to him was very kind and helped him a lot. One day he
threw his arms around her neck, proclaimed that she was his very best friend,
and kissed her cheek. The teacher dragged him into the staffroom so violently
that he fell and was literally dragged across the floor for the last few
meters. She flung him to the ground and shouted at him in Japanese for a while,
until he started crying (having no idea, I imagine, what he had done wrong).
The principal came and used google translate to tell the boy that he had done
something terrible and that he had scared and hurt the little girl. They told
him that he was never to touch another student and that he was going to be
moved to a new seat so that his victim didn’t have to be traumatised by sitting
next to him. In the middle of this the girl herself came into the staff room
and said that she had been a bit surprised, but she wasn’t at all upset and
that she understood that he had only wanted to thank her. The teachers said she
didn’t know what she was talking about and to go away. After raining a heap
more abuse on the little boy they sent him off to the counselling room. After
he was gone the teachers discussed the shocking situation. “Foreigners” they
said, oblivious to my presence, “are just like animals.”

At no point did anyone venture a thought that there may be
cultural contexts in which kids kiss and hug each other. At no point did anyone
wonder why the little boy was so confused about the trouble he was in. I wrote
before about my frustration with the way intercultural differences are treated
as cosmetic with no deeper consideration or discussion.
When that is how your education system treats other cultures, situations like
the one I described above are inevitable. And if you can’t imagine that other
people think in different ways and about different topics, you can’t
communicate with them effectively (let alone negotiate) even if you share a
language. Eryk has a thought-provoking post about this very problem here: On Having no Comment in Japan.

I’m not suggesting that all non-Japanese kids have a hard
time or are treated badly in Japanese schools. In fact, Beppu City in Oita
Prefecture provides simultaneous interpreters to attend classes with students
who don’t speak Japanese until they get settled in, as well as a comprehensive
range of other supports for international families. But the thought processes
that lead to unpleasant situations like the ones I have described are
depressingly common.

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